Review: 'Hatching,' from Finland, is a smart suburban satire wrapped in a chilling body-horror thriller
A girl and her egg are the launching point for “Hatching,” an expertly turned body-horror thriller from first-time Finnish director Hanna Bergholm.
Bergholm starts with a family showing off their picture-perfect life in the suburbs. Mother (Sofia Heikkilä) narrates the tour, which features her smiling husband (Jani Volanen), their too-cute younger son Matias (Oiva Ollila), and the pride of the family, 12-year-old budding gymnast Tinja (Siiri Solalinna). We soon realize this perfection is for show, specifically for Mother’s homemaking vlog.
While Mother is shooting the introduction for her vlog, cracks appear in her carefully orchestrated pastel-colored world, when a bird flies into the house and starts breaking things. Tinja captures the bird in a blanket, and before she can take it outside to free it, Mother snaps the creature’s neck and tells Tinja to take the body to the compost bin.
Later, Tinja discovers the bird wasn’t quite dead, and crawling out to the backyard woods. It’s there that Tinja discovers the bird’s egg — which she takes into her room to incubate. The egg grows to the size of a coffee table before a scraggly black-feathered beast emerges, and imprints on Tinja, who becomes Elliott to the bird’s E.T.
But the real monster here is Mother, pushing Tinja to the breaking point in her gymnastics practices. When a new girl in the gymnasium, Reetta (Ida Määttânen), moves in next door and befriends Tinja, Mother sees her as a challenger and therefore an enemy. This adds to Tinja’s stress, and when she’s feeling the pressure, the creature does, too — with alarming results.
Bergholm and screenwriter Ilja Rautsi turn this premise into a disturbing changeling tale, as Tinja’s bond with the creature fills in the psychic hole left by her mother’s harsh perfectionism and hypocrisy. (Did I mention Tinja catches Mother making out with the handyman Tero, played by Reino Nordin?)
Heikkilä makes a compelling wicked queen in this fractured fairy tale, but Solalinna, in her first movie, is a real find — bringing out all of Tinja’s doubts and vulnerabilities, and twisting them as the story reaches its shocking conclusion.
“Hatching” works as both a solid horror movie and as a satire of suburban shallowness and fleeting internet glory — a reminder that scary things don’t just happen in the dark.
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‘Hatching’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, April 29, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for violence, gore and some sexuality. Running time: 86 minutes; in Finnish, with subtitles.
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This review originally appeared on this site on January 23, 2022, when the film premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.